Glucose monitoring is a fact of everyday life for diabetic individuals. The accuracy of such monitoring can significantly affect the health and ultimately the quality of life of the person with diabetes. Generally, a diabetic patient measures blood glucose levels several times a day to monitor and control blood sugar levels. Failure to test blood glucose levels accurately and on a regular basis can result in serious diabetes-related complications, including cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, nerve damage and blindness. There are a number of electronic devices currently available which enable an individual to test the glucose level in a small sample of blood. One such glucose meter is the OneTouch® Profile™ glucose meter, a product which is manufactured by Lifescan Inc.
In addition to glucose monitoring, diabetic individuals often have to maintain tight control over their lifestyle, so that they are not adversely affected by, for example, irregular food consumption or exercise. In addition, a physician dealing with a particular diabetic individual requires detailed information on the lifestyle of the individual to provide effective treatment or modification of treatment for controlling diabetes. Currently, one of the ways of monitoring the lifestyle of an individual with diabetes has been for the individual to keep a paper logbook of their lifestyle, and to test their blood glucose on a regular basis, particularly before meals, after meals, and when fasting. Another way is for an individual to simply rely on remembering facts about their lifestyle and when they test, and then relay these details to their physician on each visit.
The aforementioned methods of recording lifestyle information are inherently difficult, time consuming, and possibly inaccurate. It's easy to forget to test, and paper logbooks are not always carried by an individual and may not be accurately completed when required. Paper logbooks are small and it is difficult to enter detailed information requiring detailed descriptors of lifestyle events. Furthermore, an individual may often forget key facts about their lifestyle when questioned by a physician who has to manually review and interpret information from a hand-written notebook. There is no analysis provided by the paper logbook to distil or separate the component information, and there is no way for a paper logbook to proactively remind a user to test. Also, there are no graphical reductions or summary of the information. Entry of data into a secondary data storage system, such as a database or other electronic system, requires a laborious transcription of information, including lifestyle data, into this secondary data storage. Difficulty of data recordation encourages retrospective entry of pertinent information that results in inaccurate and incomplete records.
Moreover, a diabetic individual often has to keep a plurality of devices on their person for diagnosis and treatment, for example both glucose level monitoring equipment and medication. Hence, having to carry paper records of their lifestyle and a log of when they test is an added unwanted burden, and entry of data therein is very time consuming.
There currently exist a number of portable electronic devices that can measure glucose levels in an individual and store the levels for recalling or uploading to another computer for analysis. One such device is the Accu-Check™ Complete™ System from Roche Diagnostics, which provides limited functionality for storing lifestyle data. However, the Accu-Check™ Complete™ System only permits a limited selection of lifestyle variables to be stored in a meter. There is a no intelligent feedback from values previously entered into the meter and the user interface is unintuitive for an infrequent user of the meter. In addition, there is no convenient way to remind the user when to test, and to assure that tests are being conducted at appropriate times.